Pictures of Life
by Seiberwing
Summary: After the events of case 5-4, Byrne Faraday's ex-wife comes to pick up Kay and finally gets a chance to meet her daughter's mysterious 'uncle'.


**Pictures of Life**

Alice Coulomb's cell phone rang about a half hour into her frantic train ride into the city. The courthouse was closed and Kay hadn't wanted to go home to her father's empty house, so the police had sent her over to the apartment of one of their detectives instead. Coulomb hastily scribbled the address down with a borrowed pen and pushed it onto the first taxi driver she could find outside the station, wrapped with a twenty dollar bill to make him go faster.

Byrne. Murdered. Just cut down, blinked out of the world. They'd said he'd died instantly, some small comfort that was to a half-orphaned daughter and an ex-wife who'd only too late realized she still cared about him. Coulomb leaned forward, arms wrapped tight around her, and silently willed the taxi to go faster.

She hadn't asked about Byrne's personal life much after they'd finalized the divorce. They rarely spoke anywhere but the train station at the midway point between their two cities, and only for a few moments about what Kay had been doing in the other's absence. Kay had been the emphasis in the divorce, or rather the exception—Byrne had tried to make things as fair as possible. They got equal custody and gave equal love, no point punishing Kay for her parents' mistakes, but they'd been strangers to each other for the past five years. Until now that had been how Coulomb preferred it.

It was ten at night when she arrived at the apartment complex indicated on her note. It was a dull red, the paint peeling from the door, dirt on the floor of the elevator. A horrid place for a grieving child. Coulomb ran a hand over her hair and tried to look strong.

_It's all right, Kay. Mommy's here. You'll be fine. Mommy's here._

She rang the bell at 414 and rearranged her hair again, clutching a little box lunch she'd bought at the transfer station close to her chest. Mommy's here.

The door opened the smallest slit, then gaped open to show off a seven-foot tall grizzled man in a dark shirt and suspenders. His eyes were the brightest part of him, white and bulging in contrast to a thick goatee and skin that was almost grey. The fiercesome sight made Coulomb take a step back just by looming in the doorway. He regarded Coulomb with the slightest air of derision, looking her up and down. Coulomb looked him over in reply and frowned at the sight of a revolver holster underneath his arm.

_Great role modeling, detective, wear the gun around the daughter of a murder victim._

"I'm Miss Coulomb. I'm here for Kay."

"Can I see some ID?" the man asked, voice rough and deep as gravel running down a drainpipe.

"I…I'm her mother," Coulomb stammered. Wasn't that good enough?

The man kept up his level stare. "It's procedure. You're not getting through this door unless you can prove it."

Coulomb fumbled for her wallet and pressed it into the large man's hand, glaring at him with the futility of pebbles thrown against a steel wall. The detective unfolded it and was nodding even before he got a good look at her picture. He took a step back and wordlessly jerked his head, beckoning her in.

The apartment was a cluttered sort of clean. Coulomb could see where the occupant had tried to shuffle things out of the way but hadn't quite managed to organize them. Papers and boxes and bags were out of the way along the walls as if that somehow made them disappear and a pile of laundry had been kicked into the corner. It was very much a man's apartment, and made Coulomb feel even more like the soft and scared woman she wasn't.

"Where's…oh." Kay was curled up on the sofa off to the side of the door, wrapped up in a tattered grey trenchcoat with a pillow under her head. Her backpack was leaning against the armrest, the tips of little blue and pink shoes poking out of the top. Kay herself was fast asleep underneath the coat with her bunny tight in her arms, a heartbreakingly peaceful expression on her face.

It was the coat that tipped Coulomb off. It was expansive and ragged, pocked with so many holes that anyone with a decent budget should have thrown it away years ago. Kay's stories about the coat's owner had made Coulomb envisioned a smiling man, pockets always full of candy for good little prosecutor's daughters, a man whose strong arms looked more capable of protecting than crushing. The brusque grayscale detective matched none of Coulomb's ideas of him, and if not for the coat she might have snatched Kay and run back down to hail another taxi without saying another word.

But that coat, yes, she knew that coat.

"So you're the famous Uncle Badd," Coulomb said, smiling against her will.

"Yeah." The door softly closed behind her, and two locks clicked shut. "Tyrell Badd. I worked with Faraday."

"Kay talks about you a lot."

"Heh." It was a jerked, emotionless noise barely worthy of being called a chuckle. Badd tilted his head at the slumbering form under his trenchcoat. "I just got her off to sleep. Was…hoping she could sleep a little longer." When he looked at Kay she could almost see a tiny softening of his features.

Coulomb's eyes drifted to the table and shelves pressed against the wall next to the door. They were free of the strange knick-knacks and art pieces she kept around her own house, replaced by more boxes of papers, ragged novel spines, and a mad host of framed photographs. One large picture was of a large group of stacked heads in police uniforms, marked with the class's graduating year. A few seemed to be family shots, women with huge shoulders and men with long jaws raising their glasses cheerfully to the camera.

The majority of them featured Kay.

"How's she taking it?" Coulomb asked, eyes flicking to Badd and then back to the photos. She had a copy of the one on the top shelf, taken at a movie premiere. Kay had centered on her favorite vaguely mammalian cartoon mascot, tackled it, and squealed like she'd just sighted Elvis. Byrne had told her about it as they made the bimonthly handoff and Kay waved the picture excitedly.

"Pretty well, for a kid her age," Badd said, following her gaze with what appeared to be dulled disinterest. "It took a while to really sink in. She'll pull through, I think."

There was Kay blowing out the candles at her (second) eighth birthday party, and there was Kay at the beach wearing a little striped bathing suit and that pink floppy hat she adored so much, and there was Kay in an artist's smock covered in paint smears with a large brush clenched in her fist and an expression of deep concentration. And there was Kay sitting on Badd's shoulder, Byrne leaning against him, posed in front of the gates of an amusement park. A little white stick, too thin to be a cigarette, was sticking out of Badd's mouth and the ragged trenchcoat was hanging loosely from his large frame. That same tender smile was dancing at his lips, untinged by sadness.

"They didn't tell me much over the phone," Coulomb answered distractedly, turning away from the array of pictures and back to the real-life tousled mess on Badd's couch. Her mind had pretty much centered on 'Byrne' and 'murdered' to the exclusion of anything but Kay's location. "She was in the courthouse when it happened?"

"Yeah, out in the hallway. Couldn't have been more than a few rooms away, really." Badd looked to her, large eyes again sizing her up. What was she, a suspect? She hadn't even been in the city, she'd been in a meeting with fifty rich alibis. "How much did they tell you?"

"Not much. They said the investigation was still underway."

"Right," said Badd. "Let's talk in the kitchen, give Kay a little space and quiet." Badd turned and Coulomb followed him into the narrow white kitchen on the other side of the room, a passageway between the living room and a rumpled bedroom beyond.

Badd personified the hardboiled, lonely detective image in body, but not in housing. There were no shot glasses next to whiskey bottles, no gun lying on the kitchen table, no reek of cigarettes or booze. In the sink was a heap of dirty dishes and red-stained cans labeled with Kay's favorite brand of ravioli and next to it, as if teleported from a doctor's office, was a jar of wrapped lollipops. Held to the fridge with a magnet were a few bills, nearly obscured by more Kaycentric photographs and colorful doodles. The fridge itself had a few smears of crayon on the lowest two feet, where perhaps Kay had been confused by the exact definition of 'fridge art'.

"You want a coffee?" Badd asked, gesturing to a grimy coffee pot. "I make it pretty strong."

"Sure. I wasn't planning on sleeping tonight."

"Me neither."

The pictures were usual Kay fare, bright and colorful stick figures with bulging heads and spindly fingers. One was neatly labeled 'Uncle Badd's Last Cigarette' in Byrne's handwriting and showed a grey and brown figure dropping a box (with little wiggly dark lines coming from it) into a garbage can. To the side two grinning figures, one small and one tall, waved their arms in the air with glee. By the style it had to be a few years old.

"Byrne brings you Kay's drawings?" Coulomb asked, taking a seat at the little kitchen table still stained with the scraps of dinner.

"Hm?" Badd asked, tugging a clean-looking cup from the sink. "Nah, those are from here. Sometimes Faraday works—worked late." The tiny slip put an icy stab through Coulomb's chest, and from the way Badd briefly paused in his pouring he'd felt the same cold. "So Kay'd stay over here for the night. She likes to draw for me."

One particular photo, hanging just under the freezer, caught Coulomb's eye. Kay, wearing Badd's trenchcoat with the sleeves rolled back so far they hit the shoulders, was waving his badge around excitedly, her other hand in the shape of a gun.

_"When I grow up, I'm gonna be a detective like Uncle Badd! Lemme arrest you, Mommy."_

_"Later, dear."_

"And that gun you've got hanging off you, you keep that when she's here?"

"Yeah. Usually locked up and unloaded. Won't even let her play around with toy ones, she gets the idea she can fire a foam dart and she'll think a real gun's not much different."

Coulomb remembered that argument. Byrne had used it nearly verbatim when he'd caught her giving Kay a little water gun to play with. She wondered which of them had come up with the idea first.

"But you're wearing it tonight, " she noted, nodding to the impressively sized weapon at his side.

Badd shrugged, pouring out a second cup of coffee. "I don't think Byrne's killer or her friends will be stupid enough to try for Kay. Or me. But I'm keeping it on me. You want anything in your coffee?"

"Sure. Milk. Just a little." Some of the holes on that trenchcoat had been suspiciously round. Some had been right over the chest. She hadn't realized Byrne lived so close to such a perilous world, hadn't thought to ask.

"So what happened, exactly?" Coulomb asked as Badd offered her the full cup. She should have had lunch with Byrne. Talked to him about his life, about his work, his job, his friends, his partner, his anything. She didn't want to be digging up the pieces of his life while she decided what outfit to wear to the funeral.

"Some of it's a bit classified, some of it's a bit hazy," Badd said, leaning against the counter with his own mug in hand. "What we know happened is that Faraday was going through with today's murder trial, when the defendant accused him of being involved with the murder—of being the guy that ordered it, even. They called a break in the trial and he went to talk with the defendant and his lawyer Calisto Yew. Yew stabbed him and then shot her client, because turns out she's the one who called in the original hit and wanted to cover it up. She did some evidence mangling to make it look like they'd killed each other and we ran around in circles for a few hours trying to figure out what happened before we figured out it was her. When we confronted Yew, she pulled a gun on a few other people in the room and managed to get away." He rattled off the story without a single hint of emotional content, as if giving a report to The Chief.

Coulomb leaned forward, clutching her coffee mug in both hands. "She's still out there?" she asked incredulously. "You let her get away?"

"We'll get her…we'll get her." Badd said the first sentence to Coulomb and the second to the wall behind her. He'd carried Kay so lightly in the picture but in the over-bright kitchen lights he seemed to be sagging under his own weight.

Badd obviously lived alone. His bed was small and cluttered, his dishes unwashed, his bathroom probably possessed of a lone toothbrush. There were no pictures of other smiling children or women in white dresses scattered along his shelves. Apart from the group shots he was probably blackmailed into standing at the edges of, the only two people Badd ever stood next to were Kay and Byrne.

And mostly Byrne.

Coulomb tried to picture Byrne and Badd holding hands on a park bench, watching a movie with Kay in Byrne's lap, eating dinner together, swapping stories over drinks…kissing. Cuddling. Touching. The images didn't come easily.

_Was this who you divorced me for? This stone-faced stubbly goliath in a ragged coat was better than me?_ It wasn't a fair thought. Byrne was a good man, a loyal man...he just hadn't been her man. She hadn't been his woman.

Coulomb sipped her dark coffee. It was barely splashed with milk and the bitterness stung her tongue. "Detective Badd. Can I ask you something personal?"

"Hm?"

"Were you Byrne's…were you his lover?" The word sounded too tender for anything associated with Badd, boyfriend too frivolous, partner too official, 'my replacement' too brutal. But it would be hard to read anyone's emotional range at a time like this.

Badd took a long drink, expression tight and impenetrable. It wasn't an automatic, offended denial as Coulomb had feared, more that he seemed to be trying to put his words together properly.

"Miss Coulomb…" Badd said finally, voice rougher than ever. "If there was anything I could do...anything in the whole world, anything I could give up to have that bitch stab me instead of Byrne so he'd be here and I'd be the one bleeding out on the floor...I'd do it."

"That's not really an answer."

"Then you're asking the wrong question." Badd looked away from her again, expression distant. It seemed like a rejection until he noticed that his gaze was directed just to the right of her head, through the kitchen door, out into the living room where Kay lay vulnerable on the couch.

_God_, Coulomb thought, taking in another mouthful of coffee. _I don't know if he was in love with Byrne, but he's definitely in love with my little girl._


End file.
